Headfirst into the Abyss

“It fucking hurts—“ The creature screams, kicks and scratches. There is the heavy scent of burned wires and scorched flesh in the air, something that smells like it could even be hair. Hair, perhaps, and the heavy scent of the blood.

Phoebe Donovan can even see where it’s coming from – from beneath the metal helmet, in thick black and red lashes, whenever the technicians and doctors try to pull the black, heavy metal helmet off the creature’s head.

Creature, she says, because everybody else is calling it a creature. Ten or more years ago, Phoebe had called it Arianna and the creature called her back. Mother, it said. Mom.

“Leave me alone!” The bound mess on the hared hospital bed screams. “I will kill you, leave me alone, leave me alone—“ Then, mechanical, changed by the helmet and deep. “It fucking hurts.” It doesn’t sound human. It sounds like the animal dying.

Leave your emotions behind, that’s what they thought Phoebe. That’s how good researchers do, because in the outer space you come across everything and anything. Besides, she knows—she’s thought her daughter to be dead for nearly ten years. She knew the monstrosities of the Grimgrinner. She should have no sympathy for her, no matter.

Still, she cannot help it. She cannot hear her own thoughts over her daughter’s shrieks. She cannot hear her own thoughts over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears.

“Arianna!” She says. Phoebe doesn’t mean it; it leaves her lips because she can think it through and the sound pierces through the thick air. Her daughter, her eldest child, her only daughter—she stops writhing on the bed, hands bound and face still covered in the helmet. Nobody was sure how to take it off. Nobody would dare put their hands near it, for fear of losing nails and fingers and entire arms.

There is heavy breathing in the air. With each shaky exhale, static passes through the helmet, air filters doing correctly even after extreme conditions in the outer space.

“Arianna, please.” She doesn’t know how to speak to her. She is not a girl—she’s not a nineteen-year old that Phoebe remembers. She’s not a teenager that Arianna has to chase, that Arianna has to forbid extreme sports and spaceship racing anymore. She’s a woman grown, she’s a woman changed – Phoebe knows, realistically looking, that her daughter is not human anymore.

She has seen what the Grimgrinner can do.

Just the fact that Grimgrinner is Arianna, doesn’t change the fact that Arianna is her daughter. That she’ll always be Phoebe’s daughter.

“Please?” The voice rasps, half male and half female, half human and half god. That’s what the Grimgrinner was to them, before they managed to capture it – god dictating their life and death. Chaos embodied. Chaos that Phoebe had given birth to. “Please what, mother? What is it that you want?”

She sounds strained, but her chest’s not moving. Phoebe notices, with pangs around her heart and bile collecting in her throat, that her daughter is not—she’s not the same, anatomically speaking.

The shirt Arianna’s wearing is open, but there is no chest to be seen, no womanly curves and no outlines of ribs—everything is shiny and ridged, the skin becoming something else, becoming a shield for the extremes, something human could only try to recreate. Her arms, too—once, her daughter’s nails were nice and her fingers long, but her arms are different now, asymmetrical: one is black, nails from it gone, scorch trails like veins vanish into the pale, white-yellow skin. The other, pearly white, unlike the sickly skin of the limbs. Sharp, shining as well – a tool, more than it is a hand.

Phoebe’s seen her daughter kill people with less than hands.

“We just want to see you. We wish you no death.” She can’t promise her daughter less pain. She can’t promise her, because they’re not going to give it to her. No closure, no painless trial will await her. She’s a monster that monsters are afraid of, wraith that has even ghouls checking beneath their bed. The evil above all. There is no salvation for her; there are no promises.

“See me?” The voice sounds like a man now, something that the helmet must surely do – mask the voice, hide the identity. “I will let you see me, mother.”

“Yes.” She says, voice hopeful, and her eyes flitting over the technicians, the doctors, anybody, anybody—they need to—They need to collect as much as they can. Everything they can.

There is a sickening click—a metal stripe coming off the back of the helmet and peeling towards the front. There’s blood, more of it, scarlet red this time, and there’s something else, white and yellow coming out with it too, slightly more dense. It smells pungent and rotten.

The peeling is not quiet, but it’s not as loud, anymore. At one point, the mask tears through the skin beneath until there is nothing but bone left on Arianna’s cheekbone, but there, in front of Phoebe’s very own eyes, the skin stretches back and heals, scars gone as if though they’d never been there at all.

She’s still a mess, though—it smells worse than a body that’s been left to rot under the Sun, because this body has been dead and adapting at the same time, going through the changes that normal humans cannot even imagine.

How did happen? How is it possible? How, how did Arianna become what she is now?

“Aria.” Phoebe breathes out, because it’s her. It’s really her, truly—her little reckless Aria. “Aria, please—“ But she doesn’t know what she’s begging for. Please what? Please come back home with me? Please be human again? Please do not move and do not disappear because I thought you were dead for ten years and my baby is with me again?

Swallow your heart, digest your emotions. Phoebe knows she doesn’t need them here. She can’t have them here. Her baby has committed a genocide.

“What happened to you, Aria?” The eyes looking back at Phoebe belong to her daughter – large and honest, daring. She looks, almost, like she’s looked ten years ago. Slightly sharper, definitely more bloody, not bruised but visibly wounded. Her lips are chapped, red and grey and black among the peeling skin remnants.

“Power, mother.” How punishing that word sounds—mother. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts because Phoebe knows that Arianna doesn’t think of her as of mother. “Power changed me.” It’s her voice. It’s her voice, but when she speaks she doesn’t open her mouth, doesn’t move her throat in the slightest. She doesn’t—it changes things. They thought the helmet could change voices, but now they know better.

Now they have one more reason to be afraid of her.

“Power.” She opens her lips now, voice male and deep, then high-pitched. “It made me ugly and strong. Can’t you see me? I’m big. I’m important.” She inclines her head towards Phoebe, long golden strands spilling across her shoulders, catching blood and grime and who knows what else. It’s starting to smell of sulphur in the room. “Aren’t you proud?”

“Not like this, Aria.” She realises, seconds too late, that the woman – that her daughter – is mocking her, challenging her. That she’s being cheeky with Phoebe because she believes that she can do that.

There is no respect in Arianna’s eyes. No compassion, no lovely spark that should be there. It never was, not even when she was a child, and Phoebe’s been warned but she didn’t listen. She didn’t, and she ended up with a psychopath alien child.

“Yes, mother, yes like this.” A pause. This is the first time Arianna’s face has been seen – ever. This is the first time that the Grimgrinner has a human face in front of himself. Phoebe gasps, surprised, because she thought—she thought there was a life within her daughter, another creature living inside, but moments later she realised that it was a tongue that made its way out of Arianna’s mouth. Scaly, dark and hard like everything else on her – on him, on them, on it, on it, on it – it went across the skin of the lips, peeling leftover skin with the coarse surface.

Shedding, changing, adapting.

“Like this, because there is no other way.” A pause, blue eyes flittering across the room. Her eyelids are red, although the small, barely-visible veins are black and blue and yellow, nearly white. “Now, if you’ve seen me enough—I would like to leave.”

She says it so calmly—I would like to leave. Like she has the right. Like she can do it.

With a gut-wrenching pain, Phoebe realises that she probably can. If that’s true, if it turns out to be anything more than a blatant lie, a bluff, they’re all going to die. They’re all dead men walking.

“Aria—“ She tries to say, but there’s a scalpel already rising on the table next to her daughter. It’s fast, barely able to be seen, and passes through three people before it comes to a stop in the wall. The rest skip away, hide, terrified—it’s justified, but Phoebe cannot move, rooted in front of her own daughter.

Arianna’s standing now, the metal cage holding her captive shredded like cloth on her feet, and she fixes her thin, plain coat, the one trademark of the Grimgrinner. The suit, and the grinning helmet. They all thought it had been a guy, or at least something close to a man.

They were wrong. She’s nothing—she’s not a man and she’s not a woman. She’s a creature that stopped being a daughter ten years ago.

“How about this, mother?” Her lips are whitish yellow, her tongue black and the inside of her mouth blood red. She’s terrifying and Phoebe trembles. “I’m not half human and half god.”

Phoebe’s breath catches in her throat—she has trouble breathing. It hurts, it hurts—around her heart and around her soul and her head, it hurts too, her vision swimming because of the pressure. Her daughter. That’s who’s the monsters. Her daughter, the one she had birthed and loved and—and—

“I’m all death.”

Phoebe believes her.